Sargent, a 56-year-old Rockford man, became emotional Wednesday, Sept. 11, as he spoke about his life-saving transplant, his organ donor and the medical team that performed the rare operation. Fewer than a couple of dozen heart-lung transplants occur each year in the U.S., according to Gift of Life Michigan.

“I was very, very sick. Getting a new lease on life is hard to get your hands around,” Sargent said at a news conference at Spectrum Health’s Meijer Heart & Vascular Institute. “You wrestle with it every day. It has been truly, truly a great ride.”

Sargent received his new heart and lungs Aug. 23 and was ready to go home to Rockford on Wednesday.

Sargent described himself as an oil-field worker and “an outdoors guy. I’ve worked all over the place. I’m a wood chopper. I like to fish and hunt. That’s about my story right there,” he said.

As he gets stronger, he most looks forward to being able to do “outdoors stuff” again.

“It’s something I miss terribly,” he said. “Just to be able to bird-hunt and do all the things I’ve grown up with all my life.”

For now, Sargent said he is pleased to be able to walk and talk without becoming exhausted.

“I walked down here from my room. I’m not in a wheelchair,” he said. “I’m talking to you folks. Before I came here, I probably would have gotten 10 words out and I’d sit down.”

For six years, Sargent has suffered with idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension, a condition in which the arteries that carry blood from the heart to the lungs constrict abnormally, raising the blood pressure in the lungs and straining the heart.

His sister, Lynn Harkins, said it was difficult to see the toll the disease took on her brother, who once was a powerful, muscular man.

“In the past few years he has really gotten sicker and sicker and thinner and thinner,” she said. “He was probably going to be dead within the next three months.”

The disease can often be treated with medication. In some cases, a double-lung transplant is needed, said Dr. Reda Girgis, the medical director for lung transplants at Spectrum.

However, in Sargent’s case, the condition had caused end-stage right-heart failure. When heart and lung specialists at Spectrum Health evaluated Sargent’s condition, they agreed that a combined heart-lung transplant was his best option. Although the operation is rarely performed now, Dr. Asghar Khaghani, the surgical director of the transplant program, performed about 200 heart-lung transplants during his career in England.

Spectrum surgeons have performed 32 heart transplants and nine lung transplants since November 2010, Girgis said.